David French

It's just absolutely turned it way up.

You know, at the height of the cancel culture craze,

You did not see the kinds of explicit federal intervention into free speech that we're watching now systematically across sector after sector after sector.

And there are going to be people who will say, well, what about the Biden administration attempting to jawbone social media?

What we're witnessing right now, Tim, is so far beyond bureaucrats jawboning a social media site over coronavirus stories.

It's hard to even see that in the rear view mirror at this point.

It's one of the most comprehensive attacks.

I was talking to an expert in free speech and I said, look, I don't want to engage in hyperbole.

I said, my own view is that the current environment for free speech is worse than the Red Scare.

but not as bad as the Wilson administration.

Because Wilson, a lot of people forget, he jailed his political opponents by the hundreds.

Sure, yeah.

And this person I was talking to said, no, I think it's worse than Wilson and I'll tell you why.

He said, no, we have not seen the jailing at large scale of political opponents.

We're seeing that sort of starting to try with Comey prosecution, et cetera.

Yeah.

But-

When Wilson was doing that, he was doing it without the free speech case law that exists now.

In other words, he wasn't defying the known legal precedent on free speech.

And in fact, one of the first big cases after the Wilson era was this dreadful Schenck versus United States case that actually upheld free